Some political falsehoods aim at affirmation of authority, not belief

Evidence

Liars want their lies to be believed as if they were the truth, but it is not clear that Trump cares whether his falsehoods are believed; he seems to care only that they are affirmed. He wants the power to make others assent to his version of reality. When Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, said that Trump’s inauguration had “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration,” he may not have intended for people to believe him, only to describe the world Trump wished for, and thus to enact Trump’s own power. It was not a lie but rather an act of submission. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 164

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s central contrast between lying-truth and conspiracist reality-ownership; also resonates with the reader’s earlier work on silence and submission gestures. — connects to: Political visions are judged by the worlds they create, not their factual truth — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 434; Ideology operates through acting as if you believe, not sincere conviction — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1661; A leader can render a disputed proposition ‘true enough’ by practical fiat — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 132 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Conspiracism differs from bullshit in its emphatic demand for affirmation #expands (0.85) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 166
• People can sincerely promote useful falsehoods without conscious base motives #expands (0.82)
• Institutional credibility depends on not openly repudiating citizens’ counterfactual idealizations #expands (0.80) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 13
• Secular political movements can weaponize religious claims they do not believe. #exemplifies (0.80) — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 495
• Mediaeval Christian polemicists treated useful falsehood as probable truth #exemplifies (0.75) — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1385